Firmware update and drive is unformated - Drivestation HD-LB3

[Agouti]

I have a Drivestation HD-LB3.0TU3-A3 which I updated the firmware from 2.05 to 2.08 and now windows claims the drive is unformated - and the only partition is a 357699 MB one (the rest is apparently unpartitioned).

 

Going back to the page again I found text down the bottom that says that firware is available for North American users only... I'm Australian, could this be the issue?

 

 

I CANNOT afford to lose all the data on it!

 

As an added bonus I can't download the DriveNavigator software as it claims my S/N is invalid.

 

What the hell do I do?

[davo]

Agouti wrote:

 

I CANNOT afford to lose all the data on it!

Then where is your backup? if it is showing as unformatted then you will need to use data recovery software to recover the information and then proceed with the format?

 

[Agouti]

Perhaps I was a little over-anxious, all my really critical data I don't trust to disk drives at all, that is what dropbox/skydrive is for. It is all important to me though, and monstrously inconvenient to replace.

 

I highly doubt the drive is unformated, I only updated the firmware. If I had of thought there was any danger in updating firmware I wouldn't have done it.

 

I got it to backup the data from my desktop drive, which was chock full, so I moved everything off onto the drive so I could defragment and such before copying it back. I hadn't gotten to the second part yet. 

 

Please, I don't need chastizing for backup practices, I'm more interested in a solution. I'm going through data recovery steps at the moment but it is horribly, horribly slow - over 8 hours at the current estimate.

 

I will be buying a second drive, but whether at this point I don't think it will be a Buffalo unit.

[davo]

Well to be fair, if its showing as unformatted on multiple PC's then it is unformatted, proceed with the data recovery and then reformat the HDD.

[Agouti]

Seems a pretty bad bug if through updating firmware it deletes all the partitions on the drive.

[davo]

There might of been an underlining issue with the existing partition.

[webgrower]

Agouti, Did you ever get a reasonable resolution to your question? Did you save your data? I read the terse and commonly useless information that the so-called experts seem to impart here. Obviously neither experts or useful individuals. I currently have this same issue and like you, believe Buffalo's sales material thinking that these devices were a backup solution. They are supposedly a RAID array after all. Obviously, they have a critical flaw that they are not addressing.